Thus the United States, in a quarter of a century, has assumed a cosmopolitanism in which the early German and Irish immigrants appear as veteran Americans. This is not a stationary cosmopolitanism, like that of Constantinople, the only great city in Europe that compares with New York, Chicago, or Boston in ethnic complexity. It is a shifting mass. No two generations occupy the same quarters. Even the old rich move "up town" leaving their fine houses, derelicts of a former splendor, to be divided into tenements where six or eight Italian or Polish families find ample room for themselves and a crowd of boarders.
Thousands of these migratory beings throng the steerage of transatlantic ships every winter to return to their European homes. The steamship companies, whose enterprise is largely responsible for this flow of populations, reap their harvest; and many a decaying village buried in the southern hills of Europe, or swept by the winds of the great Slav plains, owes its regeneration ultimately to American dollars.
They pay the price of their success, these flitting beings, links between distant lands and our own. The great maw of mine and factory devours thousands. Their lyric tribal songs are soon drowned by the raucous voices of the city; their ancient folk-dances, meant for a village green, not for a reeking dance-hall, lose here their native grace; and the quaint and picturesque costumes of the European peasant give place to American store clothes, the ugly badge of equality.
The outward bound throng holds its head high, talks back at the steward, and swaggers. It has become "American." The restless fever of the great democracy is in its veins. Most of those who return home will find their way back with others of their kind to the teeming hives and the coveted fleshpots they are leaving. And again they will tax the ingenuity of labor unions, political and social organizations, schools, libraries, and churches, in the endeavor to transform medieval peasants into democratic peers.
Footnotes:
[34] This lament of Henry James's is cited by E.A. Ross in The Old World in the New, p. 101.
[35] Emily Greene Balch, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 8-9.
[36] Edward A. Steiner, On the Trail of the Immigrant, p. 228.
[37] This is an estimate made by the Reverend W.X. Kruszka of Ripon, Wisconsin, as reported by E.G. Balch in Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, p. 262. Of this large number, Chicago claims 350,000; New York City, 250,000; Buffalo, 80,000; Milwaukee, 75,000; Detroit, 75,000; while at least a dozen other cities have substantial Polish settlements. These numbers include the suburbs of each city.
[38] This is accounted for by the fact that the Hungarian Government rigorously censored Slovak publications.